Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural politics as part of the partnership between The Maine Monitor and the Bangor Daily News, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
MACHIAS — Washington County commissioners presented a 2026 budget that includes a 40% budget hike at a lengthy and packed public hearing Thursday at which residents lambasted officials trying to manage a fiscal crisis.
The proposed budget is due to receive edits from an advisory committee. It undergirds a $11 million bond issue up for a referendum on the Nov. 4 ballot. Overhanging the budget meeting was the possibility that voters, outraged by mismanagement and frustrated by high taxes, might reject the bond the proposed budget is meant to support.
The bond would allow the county to refinance its debts after years of budget mismanagement drained its reserves. After years of spending money without verifying how much was really present in accounts, the budget ran dry earlier this year. That forced the county to take on millions more in debt that comes due in December.
With debts mounting and no cash to repay them, Washington County is on track to run out of money by the new year. Even without a bond, the county is legally obligated to provide a variety of services, making a total shutdown impossible, but the alternative remains unclear.
“We’re screwed,” Commissioner Courtney Hammond said ahead of the meeting.
While Washington County residents will vote in November on whether to allow the bond issue to proceed, the county does not hold a vote on its budget. After edits, the advisory committee and the commissioners will negotiate until they approve a budget.
The ultimate product will require far more from Down East towns. It means more budget battles between town select boards and their constituents in 2026 as governments weigh raising taxes, cutting services or both to cover county expenditures that would be fixed.
A budget advisory committee is the towns’ only chance to have a say on the county budget that they must pay for, though it remains unclear what may be cut.
“We simply won’t have enough cash to continue to keep the county functioning without doing something else dramatic, and I’m not sure what that is right now,” Eastport City Manager Brian Schuth said ahead of the meeting before being elected to chair the advisory committee.
But the budget proposal was not the main event on Thursday. Though all three commissioners are new to their roles, they each sparred with members of the public, dozens of whom gathered to voice concern about the county’s spending and to hear about what might happen if the bond measure fails.
In a lengthy public comment period, many voiced distress about voting on a bond referendum despite not having a clear view of what may happen if it fails.
Robin Hadlock Seeley of Pembroke, said she’d spent hours looking through the county’s most recent audit from 2021. She said she still did not understand what went wrong.
“Personally, I’m not comfortable voting on this referendum until I feel comfortable that I really do understand what happened year after year after year, how that ends up to such a terrible mess,” she said.
Many others expressed bewilderment at the past mismanagement and the bond proposal.
“I pay my taxes. I pay my bills. I watch my budget,” Julie Morgan of Northfield said. “I’m ashamed that you folks would actually come to the taxpayers to bail you out.”
“We had no alternative,” Commissioner David Burns said in response.
With the mismanagement of funds occurring mostly during the tenure of previous commissioners under the oversight of longtime treasurer Jill Holmes, who resigned just days prior to the meeting, there were few public officials present who had been serving in prior years. Repeatedly, officials passed blame onto prior commissioners.
After about an hour and a half of public comments, former Commissioner Chris Gardner, who served for 20 years before retiring last year, stepped forward to apologize that the errors hadn’t been caught sooner.
“If you want accountability, if you want somebody to blame … I’m your huckleberry,” he said. “I’m sorry, I missed it.”